Microsoft (Microsoft) announced this week that it would lay off 10,000 employees, or 5% of the total number of employees. The main reason behind the layoffs was that Microsoft was actively expanding its staff to seize business opportunities during the epidemic. As the number of employees decreased, Microsoft also rearranged the company’s future development projects, and one of the projects that was cut was Metaverse.
Microsoft acquired AltSpaceVR in 2017, but now it will stop the development of AltSpaceVR’s VR platform and will permanently shut down on March 10. AltSpaceVR is an immersive social space on the Internet, allowing users to invite 3D virtual avatars of friends or colleagues to gather together.
As AltSpaceVR used to lead the Microsoft Metaverse project, it may now be replaced by Microsoft Mesh, a communication and collaboration platform designed to connect globally distributed workplaces. Microsoft also stated that in the short term, the company’s VR research and development will focus on creating work experience, they will learn from early customers and partners, and ensure that they can provide a safe and reliable VR infrastructure.
In addition to AltSpaceVR being eliminated by Microsoft, Microsoft also cut down the R&D team of MRTK tools. MRTK is Microsoft’s “Mixed Reality Toolkit”, a cross-platform framework for spatial anchors in virtual reality spaces.
Technology foreign media “Windows Central” believes that Microsoft has lost the momentum to develop HoloLens devices after laying off the MRTK and AltSpace VR teams. Microsoft tried to sign a HoloLens contract with the U.S. military in the past, but the plan was delayed by Congress due to problems. The layoffs have also become another major obstacle to the development of HoloLens.
It’s unclear what Microsoft’s plans for the future of VR and the Metaverse project are. Facebook rebranded itself as Meta more than a year ago, making Metaverse a hot topic in the industry. The over-investment of the company has been warned by the company’s shareholders, and now coupled with Microsoft’s layoffs, it can be seen that the future of the virtual reality world is bleak.
Apple is a survivor of tech giant layoffs
In addition to Microsoft and Meta developing the metaverse project, another technology giant that is actively launching VR devices is Apple (Apple), and Apple is also a large company that survived the recent layoffs in the technology industry. In the past, the scale of the company has not been rapidly expanded.
In 2020, the closure of the city due to the epidemic will make the Internet more important to people’s lives, prompting technology companies to expand their business, and as sales and profits continue to rise in 2021, technology companies will continue to increase the number of employees.
But now, with remote work coming to an end, inflation and the Ukraine-Russia war affecting energy markets, tech giants are downsizing their companies to keep shareholders happy even in a tough economy. However, since Apple has not significantly increased its hiring rate in the past two years, it has not announced any large-scale layoffs.
Microsoft will have 220,000 full-time employees by the end of June 2022, a 22% increase over the same period in 2021. Amazon (AMZN) surges by 310,000 jobs in 2021. Meta has added thousands of employees every year since it went public in 2012. In 2020, Meta added more than 13,000 employees, and the total number of employees increased by 30% from the original. In 2021, Alphabet has added more than 21,000 employees, and the number of employees has increased by 15% in a year, with a total of more than 150,000 employees.
In contrast, Apple has more than 160,000 employees as of September 2022, including corporate employees and retail employees. But this is only a 6.5% increase over the same period in 2021, which equates to only a real increase of 10,000 employees. Apple also hired conservatively in 2020, adding less than 7,000 employees by September 2021.
Sources: Windows Central, Apple Insider, TechCrunch, CNBC
Responsible editor: Jocelyn
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The first draft of this article was compiled for INSIDE using AI.